The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

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Title: The Magician’s NephewAuthor: C.S. LewisSeries: Chronicles of Narnia #1Rating Out of 5: 4 (Really good read!)My Bookshelves:Classics, Easy reading, FantasyPace: FastFormat: NovelPublisher: GraftonYear: 19555th sentence, 74th page: But he was, in any case, as vain as a peacock; that was why he had become a Magician.

When Digory and Polly discover Uncle Andrew’s secret workshop, they are tricked into touching the magic rings which transport them to the Other Place. But even Uncle Andrew doesn’t realise the wonders that await them, for here is the gateway to the Land of Narnia and the beginning of many wonderful adventures there…

I found this Narnia story a little harder to get into at the beginning. Probably because the rest of the books have got residual characters from previous books. Characters that I have already formed an attachment to. However, from the third chapter onwards, I was happily hooked and involved. And, as it turns out, these are characters and happenings that are actually integral to the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The Magician’s Nephew is a story that I’ve read a few times – actually, it’s the first prequel to a series that I’ve really sunk my teeth into. And, it’s everything that a prequel should be. There is a sense of beginning, and although there is still the typical beginning, middle and end, the end is a little more open and there is a sense of new starts throughout the tale. Or at least, that’s how I always feel when I finish The Magician’s Nephew – like this small tale might be over, but the big battle is just beginning.

A big part of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and indeed, all of the Narnian stories is the fact that while the land is not a land of men, it must be ruled by man (or woman). It makes the stories work, but it is something that annoys me – the symbolic mastery of man over nature as though it can’t survive without us. But, regardless of that, I had always wondered how other men had come to the world. In the first book, they came through the wardrobe, in Caspian’s time, his people long ago slipped through another portal and bred up in a different country within the world. So, how did the first king and queen arrive? The Magician’s Nephew answers this, and how the wardrobe came to be, and even how the queen managed to sink her teeth into Narnia in the first place. So many questions that I hadn’t even known I needed answered…